


Wretched Antigone

by qlstrange



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Alcohol, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Child Abuse, Gen, Heavy Angst, Seriously there's a lot of angst in this, Suicide Attempt, Very Heavy Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-22
Updated: 2012-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-31 14:32:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/345122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qlstrange/pseuds/qlstrange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The personal history of Sherlock Holmes has always been a mystery to Doctor Watson, one which he ventures to unravel. What he learns is almost more than his heart can bear to hear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wretched Antigone

**Author's Note:**

> Story contains graphic child abuse and attempted suicide. If these are triggers for you, I recommend not reading.

Together we crashed through the door leading into the parlor of Whitehall Manor, where Lady Cassandra was crouched at the hearth, frantically sifting through the ashes.  At the sudden noise, she looked back at us and all color drained from her already pallid face.




“A- _ha!_ ” Holmes cried, his voice taut and his eyes alight with the madness that came so closely twined with his genius.   “As I suspected!  Do not move, Madame, or my colleague shall be forced to shoot!”

My revolver was already out and weighing heavily in my hand, but I held it aloft for good measure and kept it trained on the wretched woman.

“Mr. Holmes!” she said, the name riding on the crest of a terrified breath.  “But how could you possibly know?”

“Fool that I was to have overlooked the initial clues, but your blunder at the riverbank last night made it quite clear to me,” he explained.  “It was folly to try to dispose of such vital evidence in a slow-moving stream.  Why, that bloodied smock barely moved half a yard before I managed to recover it.”

She clasped a hand over her breast and for a second I thought she might faint dead away.  But though she gave swoon, she managed to hold herself upright with a hand braced on the hearth.

“How could you, Madame?” I asked in spite of myself.  “Your actions are indefensible!  Your own brother?”

“Oh, but the blackguard had it coming!” she spat venomously.  “After what he did to little Emmeline?  Yes, Mr. Holmes, I did it!  And I would do it again!”

“Well, there’s certainly no fear of that,” Holmes said, not without some trace of self-satisfaction.  “The Scotland Yard should be arriving, if my skills of estimation do not fail me, sometime within… within, ah…”

He trailed off in the middle of his thought.  I noticed that his keen eyes were pinned on the mirror over the mantelpiece just opposite our current location, and after a moment, his brow arched in an sudden expression of horror.

“Watson!” he cried.  “Behind you—!”

But before I could react to his warning, a lance of pain raced down my spine and I toppled to the ground with a cry.  Holmes barreled forward not but a moment later, and despite the incredible pain in my back I wrenched myself over in time to see Holmes engaged in hand-to-hand combat with my assailant.

Though I was aware, at least tangentially, that I was rapidly losing blood from the wound which I surmised to be just above my left scapula, I had enough of my wits to watch with a strange, detached astonishment at my friend, and the animalistic savagery with which he swiftly disarmed and incapacitated my attacker.

His power and deadly poise, which had come at the drop of a hat, were nothing short of astonishing.  But what surprised me even more, even through the growing fog of a mind made hazy by blood loss, was the expression on his face:

Rage: pure, focused and lethal.

For Holmes, many emotions had always been foreign.  Even those with which he was familiar – amusement, melancholy, frustration – came with a certain clinical detachment indicative of his imperiously logical nature.  Seeing him at that moment was seeing the veil drawn back for the first time.

An uppercut to the assassin’s jaw.  Sideswipe to the nose.  Shattering kick to the solar plexus.  He collapsed like a house of cards at Holmes’s feet, who stood over his felled victim, every lean muscle tight with fury: a challenge.

_Not my Watson._

In my delirium, I suddenly felt deeply honored.  My vision soon began to swim, however, and a moment later and I dropped back onto the Persian rug.

“Watson?” came his voice, though it sounded very far away.  “Watson!  Hold on!”

Hands on my face, more shouting, calls for a doctor.  And then I knew nothing.

 

o :: o :: o

 

I woke to the acrid but welcome scent of Holmes’s strong shag tobacco.  I was aware, in the manner of most patients after long bouts of unconsciousness, that some time had passed, though I couldn’t have said how much.  There was a throbbing pain in my back, which intensified as I rose upward through the various levels of consciousness.

Despite myself, I groaned in agony.

“Watson.”

Holmes’s honey-sweet baritone was never more welcome to my ears.  I opened my eyes and let my head roll to one side.  I saw him through a haze of bluish smoke, perched on the armchair beside the bed.  The dim light of the gas lamps put his regal, aquiline features in sharp relief and showed the lines of his face drawn into creases of worry.

“You’re awake,” he observed, his voice cautiously optimistic.  “Thank God.  It was quite touch-and-go there for a few hours.”

He rose and crossed the room so he could tap out the remainder of his tobacco into the hearth, but he soon returned to my bedside and placed both of his hands warmly over one of mine.

The grim events resurfaced in my addled brain.  Curiously, the preeminent thought became the recollection of seeing my usually stoic and abstemious companion in such a fit of perfectly unbridled fury.  And now there he was at my bedside, the cool veil of detachment once again gone from his emotions as he looked down at me, nothing but sincere and overwhelming relief on his thin face.

“How do you feel?” he prodded gently, giving my hand a reassuring squeeze.

“As if I have been skewered above my left shoulder blade,” I answered hoarsely.  Holmes seemed singularly relieved to hear it, knowing that if my sense of humor was intact, so too was my body, and he laughed.

“My dear Watson,” he said fondly.  “My most faithful Boswell.  I entreat you never to give me such a fright again.  For a few dreadful hours, I was forced to confront the idea of a reality without you in it!  As you can imagine, it was a vile dystopia, indeed!”

I tried to sit up, but Holmes gently kept me down with both hands on my chest.  I was, I realized, in my dressing gown, with thick bandaging around my upper chest.

“What of Lady Cassandra?” I asked, surrendering to my friend’s wishes and staying reclined on the pillows.

“Apprehended hours ago by Dimmock.”

“And my attacker?”

Holmes growled low in the back of his throat, another show of unabashed emotion to which I was not accustomed seeing from him.

“Recovering from an even more severe thrashing than you received, I fear, Watson,” he answered.  His words spoke of polite regret but his tone spoke of viciousness.  “By my estimation, he’ll be bedbound for six weeks and limping for six months.  In any case, he’s no longer a threat.”

“But who was he, Holmes?”

“Aedelas Blackmoore, as I suspected,” he answered, nibbling contemplatively on the end of his empty pipe.  “He was in league with the Lady Cassandra from the start.  Wretched and cowardly to the core, to attack a man from behind!”

I found it hard to defend his honor with the splitting pain in my back.

Holmes smiled down at me, giving my hand a last pat.  “Get some rest, my dear Watson,” he entreated.  “Should you need anything, I’ve rigged the bell-pull to be closer to the bed for easy access.”  He motioned with his pipe towards the jerry-rigged rope, which now dangled over the rim of the four-poster bed in which I was situated, within reasonable distance of my right arm.  “The housekeeper should be around soon with a spot of tea.”

“But where are you going?”

“To give my official statement to Dimmock _et al._ Till I saw you rouse with my own eyes, I refused to leave your side.”

“Goodness, Holmes!” laughed I.  “I appreciate your loyalty and candor, but surely you’ve kept them waiting long enough!  Go, go!”

A smile of genuine affection and a last pat on my uninjured shoulder came just before a silent exit out the bedroom door.

 

o :: o :: o

 

My injury was slow to heal and afforded me generous time to think, for I had little else to do.  Writing was out of the question (I was left-handed, after all), as was returning to my practice, any exercise that was more than mildly vigorous and, because of the nature of the medicine I was taking, most alcohol.

It even made reading bloody difficult.  And so it was fated to be a dull, albeit deeply introspective, two weeks.

I would not go so far as to call Holmes an assiduous caretaker.  At best, he was well-intentioned; at worst, flighty.  In terms of cases, he had never been busier, and though he frequently dashed off in a sudden deductive paroxysm without helping me get down the book I’d asked for, it was plain that he sincerely wished my recovery to come speedily.  He would always help me change my bandaging (if he was there to help at all, of course) and tell me not to put too much stress on the wound.  His doting, I admit, reminded me something of how my dear Mary was before her death only a few months earlier.

Every other night it seemed he’d come back to our Baker Street digs in some new costume or with some odd powder burn on his face and wistfully tell me how he wished I’d been there.  I’d beg him for full disclosure and would receive about half before some new passing fancy pulled his attention away.

I’d watch him go and think about that singular episode of the Great Detective’s rage.

The more opportunity I had to turn it over in my mind – and as I’ve stated, I had plenty – the more deeply flattering it seemed.  This was a man who was logical to the point of callousness, efficient to the point of ruthlessness, and brilliant to the point of madness.  He was the most finely-tuned deductive machine London, or indeed the world, had to offer, and certainly the foremost genius of his time.

And for _me_ , he threw away those careful barricades he’d built around his emotions that were so necessary to his craft.  For me of all people, all the airtight rules which so thoroughly reigned in his more indelicate sensibilities simply disappeared.

It was nothing short of astonishing.  An intellectual god among men had a single chink in his armor, and the chink’s name was John Watson.

And so it ran in the natural progression of things that with nothing else to do, daydreaming became one of the easiest ways for me to pass the time.  One of the most frequent daydreams was how I could use this power over him to pull away the veil over his emotions again, to see the raw, beating heart of Sherlock Holmes.

It sounded as strange to say as it was to think, but the events at Whitehall Manor succeeded in revealing a deep desire that I did not even know I had.  I wanted to strip Holmes of every barrier he had created for himself to get to the man beneath the barbs of coldness.  I wanted to know every detail of his naked soul.

I knew that I had most of the picture already.  I was, I liked to think, well acquainted with the man I met through good old Stamford all those years ago, but not with the road that brought him there.  What terrible and mystifying events could have shaped him to what he was?

He had always been so very private – not in trifles, and certainly not when it came to his mental faculties – but when it came to his childhood and personal life, he said nothing.  For a mere mortal observing the blinding sun of his genius, it was not untoward to assume that he simply _appeared_ one day in the earlier part of the century, fully-formed and exactly as he now was.  It was certainly a more fathomable conclusion than anything humbler.  It occurred to me, not without some amusement, that perhaps he was so selectively silent because it gave him such a mystique.

There was precious little to go on in any case.  He had a brother, of course, just as peculiar and astonishing as he.  And he must have a mother and father, mustn’t he?  Though I racked my brain I could not recall him ever mentioning them, not even in passing.  Perhaps he was an orphan.

My first attempt at learning the tightly coiled mystery that was Sherlock Holmes was honest and straightforward: I asked him.

It was a sleepy winter evening, in the middle stages of my recovery.  Holmes had just returned from some outing that took him, as he described to me, “into the clutches of a bank robber in a bodice and bonnet”.  But he’d wrapped it all up nicely for Lestrade and was once again in his usual armchair, thin legs stretched toward the fire and his nose buried in a book ( _Essays on the Practical Application of Osmosis_ ).

I sat in silence for a while and watched him.  If he noticed – which, given who it was I was watching, he almost certainly did – he was gracious enough not to mention it.  I’d spent three bloody, horrid years in Afghanistan but still I found myself consciously gathering the nerve to speak.  Why was I nervous?  This was Holmes; I had nothing to fear from him, surely.  I took a last anticipatory breath.

“Tell me about your family, Holmes.”

The question seemed to surprise him.  He looked up at me over the top of his book, though he did not lower it to his lap as if to prepare for a substantial answer.  “You’ve met my family,” he said, nonplussed.

“I’ve met your _brother_ ,” I corrected him.  “Surely that can’t be all the family you have.”

I watched his face carefully.  His lips pursed and his nostrils flared, and for the briefest of seconds I thought I saw his left eye twitch.

“And why should it matter?” he riposted eventually, looking back down at his book almost resentfully.

“I’m your biographer, Holmes.”

“You chronicle my work, not my life,” said he, and I was beginning to detect traces of defensiveness.

“Only because you’ve never been so forward as to give me any of your life to chronicle.”

He brusquely snapped his volume shut.  There was no mistaking it, now: he was upset, though why I could not fathom.  I had said nothing offensive or out of turn, but still he glared into the hearth, contrasting his resentment with cheerful, crackling flames.

“Holmes,” said I, “a man is the sum of his environment plus his nature.  I cannot claim to completely understand you – or, indeed, accurately write about you – if I do not know every factor in the equation that is Sherlock Holmes.”

He did not answer.  With bated breath I sat, hoping that the extended silence was merely a prelude for the story I so achingly wished to hear.

But no story came, and finally, I spoke again:

“What silences you, my friend?”

Still, no answer came.  He tossed his book onto the table, vaulted out of his armchair, and went wordlessly into his room.  The door rattled shut behind him, and I could only sit in stunned silence.

The honest and straightforward method, it seemed, did not work with Holmes.

 

o :: o :: o

 

The Diogenes Club was crowded that night, or at the very least more crowded than it had been the last time I’d seen it.   I could not imagine that its members were very many, but I could spy from the Stranger’s Room where I sat that a good number of men puttered about or sat quietly to read.  I had ventured there only two days after my conversation – and here I use the word loosely, for it was barely a conversation at all – with Holmes about his family, to call upon the aid of his brother.

It was not very long before Mycroft Holmes emerged, his metal-tipped cane announcing his presence long before he came into my field of vision.

“Dr. Watson,” he greeted with a polite, if slightly strained, smile.  I rose and shook his hand warmly before we both sat down on either end of a plush, scarlet sofa.

“I observe,” Mycroft said, “that my brother’s reticent nature is grating upon you.”

I nearly fell back in shock.  It had been only a few months since my adventure with Holmes concerning the poor Greek interpreter, and in that time I’d almost forgotten that my friend’s brother shared his brilliance.  Even reacquainted with the idea, I still had no clue how he could discern it so quickly.

“Mr. Holmes,” I said, aghast, “how could you possibly—?”

“We could only be described as amicable acquaintances, Dr. Watson,” Mycroft said easily as he settled back against his chair and set his hands on his rounded belly.  “You would not come to see me on a social call.  Indeed, the only common area we have is my brother, which is how I deduced the subject of your visit.

“As to the specifics,” he continued, “I observe that there are two paper-cuts, both perfectly horizontal and parallel to one another, on the pads of the two first fingers on your left hand.  This only comes from leafing through files at rapid succession, which is a clerical duty that a doctor would not normally perform.  I deduce, therefore, that you have been in some large city building, rifling through public records of some kind, doubtlessly in search of some answer with which my brother has failed to provide you.”

For a while I sat in silence, and then I laughed hoarsely.  It had been, as it always was, simple.  “You are quite correct,” I said.

Mycroft offered me a thin smile.  “What is it you were researching?”

I hesitated, but only for a moment.  “The names of his parents,” I said, reaching into my breast pocket for the scrap of paper upon which I’d scribbled a few names and dates.  “I managed to find record of his birth, which contained the names of his mother and father.”

My companion’s face was blank, though he seemed to be putting quite a bit of effort into keeping it that way.  His eyes looked almost distastefully across my careless scrawl.  _Grayling & Erela,_ the paper ran, _b. 1835, 1839 respectively.  Born in Blackheath, south of Colchester._

“You did not come to me in hopes I would divulge all,” Mycroft said, more of an inference than a question.

“Well, no,” I admitted.  “It seemed to me like black treachery to get what I suppose must be a delicate matter out of my dear friend’s brother when said friend would not answer.”

“Treachery, indeed,” Mycroft agreed grimly.  “My brother has good reason for his silence, Dr. Watson.  The matter is…” (here, Mycroft trailed off and looked impassively out the window, hunting for the right word) “… unhappy.”

When my mind was first able to process his words, I admit that I was quite surprised.  Eventually, however, the pieces fell into place and made me sick with realization.  What better reason could there be to keep to himself about his past?  A childhood scarred with sorrow was enough to make anyone hesitate in explaining it.

“Then if you cannot answer, at least give me a place to start,” I begged, leaning forward with my knees on my elbows.  “I can get your brother to tell me on his own accord, I’m sure of it; but I need a solid datum into which to sink my teeth.”

Mycroft regarded me with impassive hazel eyes.  His all-encompassing scrutiny, so very like his brother’s, made me, I admit, somewhat uncomfortable, but still I held fast.  Surely he understood that my intentions were honest.

Eventually, he leaned back again.

“Our parents,” he said, “are out of the picture.  Our mother, in fact, has been dead for three decades.  Sherlock does not speak of them, not even with me.  There has never been a need to speak of it between brothers, of course.  But…”

Every muscle in my body was taut with tension, awaiting the nugget of wisdom he seemed ready to impart.

“When next you see him in his dressing gown,” Mycroft said, “knock it off his left shoulder.”

This had not been the answer I was expecting.  Deflated, I could not help but ask, “What do you mean?  His shoulder?”

“What you see there should be sufficient to start a dialogue,” he answered, rising unsteadily to his feet.  “You may have already seen it, Doctor, but as my brother would say, you have not _observed_.”

So shocked was I that I did not notice he’d crossed towards the door.  When I next looked at him he’d stopped short just before leaving, hesitating on the edge of a final point.

“And Doctor,” Mycroft said, slowly, “broach the subject gently.  I know he does not look it, but Sherlock is a damaged man in many ways.  His childhood is just one of them.”

And then he was gone, having vanished just as suddenly as he’d arrived.  I looked back down at the paper in my hands, wondering if I would end up wishing I’d never learned the answers I sought.

 

o :: o :: o

 

The light was on in our window at Baker Street.  The frigid chill of London made my shoulder, mostly recovered, ache pleadingly.  As my hansom rattled away, I found my reluctant to enter.  I could not see Holmes’s lean figure silhouetted against the curtains, which did not help matters.

I climbed the stairs, weary and anxious, and slowly pushed open the door to our sitting room.

There was Holmes, curled up tightly in his armchair and wrapped in his mouse-grey dressing gown, puffing slowly at his pipe.  With such a tightly packed position, he rather reminded me of a cat – a very guarded and distrusting cat with a great deal on his mind.

“Watson,” he greeted, and his voice was unnervingly toneless, “how is Mycroft doing?”

He knew.  _Of course_ he knew; he _always_ knew.

“It was easy enough to divine your actions,” he drawled, finally looking away from the fire and giving me one of his searching glances.  “You are a supremely good man, Watson, and such men are wont to be supremely predictable.

“Your unsolicited interest in my upbringing last week went unanswered.  I could tell, because of how well I know you, my boy, that it was no trifling matter for you.  My lack of response only spurred your interest further, and of course the next place to go would be to my brother.  Though not before the public records room in city hall, I observe from your fingertips…”

I unconsciously clenched my hand shut and stuffed the paper away into my waistcoat pocket.

“Well?” Holmes pressed.  “I’m genuinely interested in what my brother divulged.”

“He divulged nothing,” I said quickly, “nor did I press him to.  I would not betray your trust, Holmes.”

“But he _did_ tell you something of significance; that much is plain, or you would not have gone at all.  And based on the way your eyes continually move to my left shoulder, I have an idea of what it is he told you.”

My jaw stiffened.  What was it about my dear friend’s shoulder that was of such significance?  Still, Holmes knew what I wanted now, and subterfuge was all but useless.  As I stepped, stiffly and with great trepidation, across the room towards his chair, I knew all I had left to hope for was his leniency.

I stopped in front of him.  Holmes looked up at me, the lines of his face drawn in such perfect sadness that the sight of it pulled at my heartstrings.  There it was again: the careful barricades around his emotions were gone, but now instead of fury it was a heart-wrenching melancholy that shone on his face.

I slowly pushed the mouse-brown dressing gown off his left shoulder and gave a start.

From armpit to collarbone on my friend’s alabaster skin ran the largest scar I’d ever seen.  It was old, so old that it was nearly as white as the rest of him, but it fell in a deep concave of toughened, twisted scar tissue.  The original wound must have been quite severe indeed, so severe that I was astonished it had not taken his arm clean off.

“Holmes!” I said breathlessly.  “What—?”

He shrugged the dressing gown back onto his shoulder self-consciously.

“This is the scar that occurs when you step in front of a moving train, and your brother is but a fraction of a second too late in pulling you out of its path,” he explained flatly.

I reeled from the shock.  For a while I tried to explain it away as anything other than what it sounded like – a mistake ( _but this is Holmes, he would not fail to hear an oncoming train_ ), or perhaps unconsciousness ( _but then why would it evoke such sorrow in him_ ) – but the conclusion was hauntingly unmistakable.  “Surely you can’t mean that—?”

“I was sixteen.  Half a lifetime ago, Watson.”

“—you tried to kill yourself?”

He could not make eye contact, and that was all the answer I needed.  Something in my chest gripped in on itself so tightly that it elicited a pain that was almost physical.  The sight of his face, drawn in soft, tragic lines very nearly slew me where I stood.

“Holmes,” I rasped, “why would you ever do such a thing?  What could possibly possess you?”

“Watson…”

There it was: the naked soul of Sherlock Holmes, what I had wanted to see.  It was dazzling and terrible and it burned me with the very coldest of ice.  At that moment, I hated myself for ever venturing to see it.  I had come too far.  Though a very real part of me did not wish to hear anymore, I could not turn back.

“Why does anyone attempt suicide?” he asked as he rubbed his bloodshot eyes.  “Because they are unhappy and see no way out.”

I sat at the end of the sofa, nearest his chair.  I was overwhelmed – in the time I’d known this remarkable man, he had surprised me in so many ways: first with his intellect, and then with his callousness, and later with his compassion when it truly mattered.  But never in my lifetime would I have suspected him of suicide!  It seemed so out-of-character for his proud, keen, precise nature!

“What happened, Holmes?” I asked.  “Would you tell me?”

“I…” The syllable teetered on the cusp of indecision.

“This is me, Holmes.  Your faithful Boswell.  Surely you can trust me with the story.”  I put my hand on his arm.  “I can see how it burdens you.”

For a long time he sat silent, his eyes tired and his thin hands trembling on his knees.  It felt like an eternity before he suddenly rose from his chair and fetched his pipe from the mantelpiece and his shag tobacco from his Persian slipper.

I leaned back in my chair.  Cigarettes were for conversation, but pipes were for stories.  I could see that he did not wish to share – or rather, to relive it, whatever it was – but when he sat back down and lit his pipe, I saw resignation on his face.  For me, he would share.  For me, he would relive.

He took a deep drag from his pipe, blew it out into wisps of smoke, and began.

 

_That paper I saw you clutching just now is accurate, Watson.  Don’t look so shocked; you know that my farsightedness is unmatched; I read it across the room.  I was born in Blackheath, which is a rambling grove of trees on the south end of Colchester, in Sussex.  It was my mother that was moneyed – she married down for the sake of love.  So it was that she, Erela, the youngest in a family of wealthy bankers, was bound to an unimpressive but good-hearted miner by the name of Grayling.  Her dowry alone allowed them to purchase a stately manor in old Blackheath, where they lived quite comfortably with a small but reputable cast of servants._

_Mycroft tells me that their marriage was a happy one, as marriages of love are wont to be.  He was utterly devoted to her and she to him, mind, body and soul.  With his new status, Grayling gave himself a bit of late education; enough to earn him a decent job as a stock trader, for he’d always had a head for numbers.  It was into this marital bliss that my mother fell pregnant with Mycroft, and they were both of them overjoyed.  A house, a stable income, and now a child on the way!  What could add to their happiness?_

_Her pregnancy went off flawlessly, and Mycroft was born a healthy eight pounds, one ounce.  Erela was a doting mother, Mycroft tells me.  Warm and loving, with a slight penchant to spoil, but never to great excess._

_A few weeks later, she fell dreadfully sick (an infection, said the doctors, stemming from complications of the birth).  It lasted many long weeks, and there were concerns for her life.  Happily, however, she recovered by autumn, and as a testament to her renewed spirit, she entreated my father for a second child._

_Pregnant she became, but only for a scant six months; the baby girl was stillborn.  Erela was devastated, but managed to muddle through with her husband’s insistence that they would try again._

_The second attempt, another girl, was also stillborn at seven months.  As was the third, a baby boy, at five.  The fourth attempt was a girl, Anthea, who survived only a few hours after birth before expiring in her cot.  As you can imagine, her sickness after Mycroft’s birth doubtlessly had caused some sort of defect in her womb, but she would hear nothing of it.  Her nerves became increasingly tattered over the seven years of failed conceptions._

_I’m told I was the fifth pregnancy, Mycroft’s notwithstanding.  My birth was not met with the same elation as my predecessor, who died so soon afterwards.  According to Mycroft, my mother was paranoid that I, too, would die in my cot._

_She sat up every night at my side, watching me.  Every one of my coughs was cause for alarm, every sneeze a crisis.  She slowly became undone – frantic, nervous, hysterical._

_Have you heard of the phenomenon known as postpartum depression, Watson?  Ah, you have; not surprising, as you’re a medical man.  They had barely begun to classify it when I was a babe, but looking back, it is clear that was what ailed her, though I am tempted to characterize as more of a psychosis than a depression.  I of course was too young to remember any of this, but according to my brother, the events of my first birthday, when that psychosis reached a peak, ran something like this:_

_Mycroft, seven at the time, was playing in the backyard, not far from the window that looked in on our parents’ bedroom.  He tells me he was in the middle of scouring the garden for interesting bugs when he heard a terrible crack.  When he looked up, he saw the inside of the aforementioned window splattered with blood._

_Our father was out in the town, so Mycroft took it upon himself and ran in as fast as his feet could carry him into the bedroom._

_My mother sat slumped in the rocking chair in front of the window.  She had blast her own head off with our father’s shotgun, and what was left of her brains were painted across the window and curtains.  Mycroft stood in horror for a while before he saw that the bath was out and full of water – and I was in it._

_He whisked me out of the water quickly; I was not breathing, he said.  But he thumped my chest and shook me until my little lungs at last expelled the water within them and I began to wail.  He swaddled me in terrycloth and rushed into his own bedroom, numb from terror._

_My father came home an hour later; Mycroft either did not hear him calling or did not have the faculties to respond.  He was left to wander in innocent confusion until he came to the bedroom he shared with his beloved wife, and saw what was left of her corpse._

_Soon he found Mycroft, and tears were streaming down his stubbled cheeks.  “What has happened, boy?” he demanded, voice tight.  “What has happened?”_

_“She is dead!” Mycroft cried, still gripping my shrieking form to his chest.  “She tried to drown Sherlock and shot herself!  I heard it, Papa, I heard it!”_

_That moment, my brother later told me, was the first moment he looked upon me with contempt.  For my part, I cannot recall a time when he looked upon me with anything else._

_Oh, Watson, do not protest.  I understand now that it was simple tragedy, and I think to some degree he understood it, too.  But try to see, Watson!  He loved Erela with everything he had and more still.  He was not a doctor as you are.  He was a man scarred by tragedy of the very worst kind, who was trying to make sense of it.  Blaming me was not so much an act of malice as it was his way of simplifying and controlling all his terrible emotions.  He was not a bad man, he was a broken one.  His son had killed his wife, and knowing that, how could he love me?_

_And oh, but if I knew then what I know now.  If I had but the knowledge, the empathy, the understanding, perhaps things would have gone differently!  But I digress… my wishes are not a part of this story._

_As I grew, so did my father’s contempt for and revulsion of me.  In my younger years, it was limited to avoidance.  He would sidestep my attempts at an embrace as one might brush off a particularly ambitious leper on the street.  I was a necessary evil of his life, something to be tolerated but under no circumstance to be approved of._

_Were it not for Mycroft, I might not have known that this standoffish behavior was at all odd.  He readily embraced my elder brother, laughed with him, checked up on his studies with the governess – all things he had never once done with me.  Mycroft was his son.  I was his problem._

_In later years, his coldness would sting even more.  I did everything I could to earn his favor – oh, how I tried, Watson!  I studied so hard, I kept my room as neat as could be, I never raised the slightest fuss!  My father, as it was with most boys, was my sun and my moon and everything I aspired to be at the time.  To have him so dismissive of me crushed me again and again._

_But that was all it was, dismissiveness, at least until my eleventh birthday._

_I remember it clearly, Watson.  Mycroft had come home from his first year at Cambridge specifically to bring me my gift: an exquisite globe to place upon my writing desk.  The mountains were raised like Braille, and it spun on its axis.  I still have it, actually – it’s that one across the room._

_My father had not bought me anything.  In fact, he had avoided me the entire day._

_This was nothing new, of course.  As you may remember, my birthday coincided with my mother’s death, and so for my father the date was eternally and irrevocably stained.  He left for the cemetery at two in the afternoon, and did not return until well after nightfall, smelling strongly of ale and sex._

 

“Sex?” I said, so abruptly that his narrative broke off.

Holmes looked to me.  “Yes, Watson, sex.  As I recall he was a frequent customer of the seedier pubs in Colchester.  He even brought some of the night-ladies home occasionally.”

I’m not sure why it astounded and enraged me so – thus far in my friend’s story it was neither the most astounding nor the most enraging thing to happen.  “He brought prostitutes back to his home with small children!” What a verminous man, I thought, what a tawdry excuse for a father!

“Well, why do you think I’ve remained a bachelor all this time?” he asked, almost sardonically, though I detected a hint of sadness in his voice.  “Aside from my governess and servants, with whom my relationships were cool and standoffish, those were the only women I properly knew.  You can imagine what I thought of women by the onset of puberty.”

The very thought horrified me.  My face must have shown it, and Holmes gave a rushing sigh.  “We are digressing,” he said.  “Pray let me continue?  It was, after all, you who requested this wretched narrative.”  I mumbled my apologies and sat back again, putting the black thoughts from my mind for now.

 

_I had stayed up that night because I had wanted to see him.  I was desperate for some small acknowledgment on this day of all days.  Surely he would condescend to a pat on the head or a smile on my birthday!  When I heard the door open, I was jerked out of my hazy state of half-sleep and rushed down the hallway into the foyer to greet him._

_“Papa, you’re home!” I said as I fought off my drowsiness._

_He looked down at me, swaying from booze and exhaustion.  His usual contempt was tempered with the haze of drunkenness._

_“I think you forgot that today is my birthday,” I reminded him eagerly._

_“I remembered,” he spat.  He shoved me roughly to one side and began to stagger up the steps._

_Wounded, I spun and hurried to the base of the stairs after him.  “I turned eleven today!” I cried desperately.  “Mycroft and I had cake!  I saved you a slice!”_

_He stopped abruptly halfway up the steps and looked back at me.  The contempt was gone, replaced entirely with rage._

_“You celebrated this day?” he asked, his voice low and dangerous._

_I had not been told that my birthday shared a date with my mother’s demise, and as a consequence I’m sure I looked perfectly puzzled._

_“You’re_ supposed _to celebrate it,” I said._

_The rage exploded into a sudden, violent physical manifestation.  With a cry he came back down the steps, the back of his hand connecting with my cheekbone._

_I was a terribly small boy for eleven, and I fell readily onto the tiled floor.  My head, I remember, hit it with a rather loud crack, and I soon felt blood running down the bridge of my nose._

_“This is not a day for celebration!” he roared.  I looked up at him and he seemed, at that moment, to be larger – and a great deal more terrifying – than life itself.  “This is the day you killed my wife!  This is the day she died, and you celebrate it?”_

_He kicked me swiftly to the ribs and I skidded helplessly against the wall at the force of the impact.  The wind was gone from me.  I struggled with every breath._

_“You killed my wife!” he said, voice strained with fury and melancholy.  “You vile thing, devil’s child!  How dare you, how dare you!”_

_The beating continued until the pain blinded me.  It was long – far too long – before he stomped drunkenly up the steps, leaving me to my battered, aching body.  It was some time before I was able to pull myself up and wobble to my bedroom.  I could not think.  It hurt too much to think, let alone weigh the gravity of what had just happened to me._

_When Mycroft came to wake me the next morning, he hailed a doctor, of course.  And he waited at my bedside and made up a story for him about a nasty tumble down the steps.  It wasn’t until he left that he sat down on the edge of my bed, looking with concentrated anger at the bandaging around my brow._

_“He did it, didn’t he?” Mycroft asked, voice low and dangerous._

_I knew who he meant of course; there was no need to clarify.  I could only nod weakly, for I had not the strength to speak._

_Mycroft swore colorfully for being in front of a child.  “The wretch,” he hissed.  “Sherlock, you must listen to me.  I cannot protect you at Cambridge, but I can give you the knowledge to protect yourself.  Do not approach him when he smells of whiskey.  If he begins to shout, leave the room immediately.  I will have words with him, but I cannot guarantee their success, and so you must promise to do as I have just told you, lest this happens again.  Do you understand me, Sherlock?”_

_I thought of how lonely it was with Mycroft away at college.  I thought of how badly, even now, I wanted my father’s love and approval.  I thought of the mother I did not remember, and of the accusation I’d received the other night, that I had killed her.  I thought of myself, as a baby, with blood on my small hands.  It was not a nice thought, Watson.  It nearly tore my heart in two._

_But still, I nodded._

_“Good.”  Mycroft smiled reassuringly at me, stroked my hair away from my face, and then left me in my room (making sure my favorite books were in easy reach of my bed)._

_I could hear the two of them shouting in the drawing room.  It was too muffled for me to understand and I was too weak to go and spy on them, but I distinctly heard the words “child”, “kill”, and “vile” thrown around quite a lot._

_The words, as Mycroft surmised they mightn’t, did not work._

_I did try, Watson, in my defense.  I did as Mycroft had asked and ducked away whenever I smelled whiskey on his breath or saw that familiar anger in his eyes.  But without my dear brother around to safeguard me all hours, the contempt which had, on my eleventh birthday, culminated into pure hatred for me lashed out frequently._

_The beatings were horrid affairs.  The physical pain I could recover from… but the words, Watson, the words!  The things he said to me during those terrible thrashings made my blood run cold and my heart break._

_My mother’s death was my fault.  I had stolen her from my father and brother before her time.  I was worthless.  A plague on my house.  Sent from the devil, himself, even…_

 

“Holmes!” I cried.  My friend stopped again mid-story.  “You weep!”

It seemed to come as a surprise to him; one thin hand lifted and pressed to his cheek, smearing the wet line down his jaw.  At once I pulled my handkerchief from my pocket and accosted him with it, but he shook his head.

“No, no, my dear Watson,” he said with a voice thick with the emotions that had been brewing in his story.  “I would not sully your monogrammed kerchief with these bitter tears.  A spot of brandy is what I need, then I should be fine to continue.”

Holmes started to rise but with one hand I stopped him.  I hurried to fetch him the drink, and when I returned he’d wiped his tears on the sleeve of his dressing gown.  He took the glass gratefully.

“Thank you,” he rasped, and I sat back down.  He drank the amber liquid down in a fast, urgent swallow, and then leaned back against his chair again to continue.

 

_But all else that had happened in my life could be excused, Watson, as mere trivialities but for the most singular tragedy of my young life:_

_I started to believe him._

_He spoke with such conviction, after all; more than enough for my young mind to be swayed.  For who could cause such an otherwise noble man to drink and into the arms of prostitutes?  Why, no one but a villainous boy who’d killed his mother._

_No, Watson, please.  I know what you are about to say, and I assure you it would be wasted breath._

_As I began to believe every word that came with his beatings, my sense of self-worth plummeted.  I withdrew.  Things that once entertained me failed to hold my attention.  I’d once held a dream of following Mycroft’s footsteps into the noble halls of Cambridge, but by my sixteenth birthday, I had convinced myself that I was not worthy._

_I believe it was in early winter when I decided that I should die._

_I initially thought of jumping, but alas, Colchester was an unfortunately flat place.  I then thought of perhaps using a gun, but I did not wish to shame my mother’s memory further by imitating the manner in which she died.  Then I thought of drowning—_

 

“Holmes, Holmes!” I cried, rising.  “This is too much for my heart to bear!”

His narrative tapered off again.  He gripped his dressing gown more tightly around his lean form and watched the fire crackle, his expression morose, but somehow far away.

“Please, old friend,” I entreated, “spare me this particular thought process.  It makes my soul ache.”

For a while he was silent.  Eventually, he took another sip of his brandy.

“Very well, Watson.  Brevity, I suppose, is the soul of wit.  Sit down, old boy; I shall cut to the chase.”

 

_I settled at last: I would lie down on the train tracks that went east out of Colchester towards London.  They got plenty of traffic, and it would be over too quickly for me to feel any pain.  I bundled up that afternoon and left the briefest of notes folded neatly on my desk – it has been a while, but I believe it was no more than a paragraph in length with a short apology to my Mycroft, my father and my mother._

_I bundled myself up for the walk.  I remember it clearly, Watson.  I drank it all in, for I knew that it would be the last day I ever saw.  The town was blanketed in nearly a foot of snow, and the world was silent.  The sky was overcast – the threat of another snowstorm, no doubt – but still the reflected light off the snow burned my eyes._

_I plodded through the woods and found the train tracks in their usual spot about two miles away from the edge of our property line.  It was quiet as death, Watson.  I heard no train.  But still I laid myself down, draped across the swatch of visible earth that earlier trains had carved through the snow._

_And I waited.  It felt like hours.  Too long, at any rate.  I lied there and thought of my life, my mother, and the comforting hatred I felt for myself._

_And then, the low whistle in the distance.  The churning of the engine.  I shut my eyes tightly and held my breath, knowing that the agony would soon be over._

_Mycroft had not been expected home till next week.  I did not know he’d come early, at least not until I heard him crying my name from the trees just beyond the tracks._

_“Sherlock, Sherlock!”_

_My jaw tightened.  The train was drawing closer and I lay there, a wretched Antigone, hoping my brother would not have to see me this way._

_The long, low whistle grew louder still.  I steeled myself.  It could be no less than half a mile off… then yards… then mere feet!_

_And then, a sharp grab at my arm, a mighty pull and I was tugged off the tracks, but not soon enough, Watson, as you saw beneath my dressing gown.  Not nearly soon enough._

_The pain was more intense than any I had ever known.  I could feel each strand of the muscles in my arm as they tore, the bone cracking, the hot blood springing free from my shoulder.  Some part of the train had caught me, and its massive iron teeth had almost separated my arm from the rest of my body.  Unconsciousness did not come quick enough._

 

He fell silent, his sad gray eyes watching the fire.  It lit the edges of his skin with a luminous orange outline.

I had wanted his bare, beating heart, and I had gotten it.  Oh, how I had gotten it!  This was the man I’d yearned to see precisely as he was, and he was broken.  Brilliant, deadly, fascinating, beautiful – and so very, very broken.

“I don’t think Mycroft ever truly forgave me for my suicidal attempt,” he reflected softly. “It has been a wedge between us ever since.”

“But you recovered,” I said, though it was more like a hope.  “Such thoughts never again crossed your mind, I pray?”

“They did once or twice in the following years,” Holmes admitted.  “Cambridge, I think, saved my life more than anything else.  It was where I flourished.  And where I first began to flex that deductive muscle which you’ve so closely chronicled, Watson.”

He managed a smile.  It was bittersweet and desperate.

“Being away from my father, learning, experiencing… they were the steady but effective cure my soul so badly needed.  For the first time in years, I believed myself to have a few positive qualities amongst the bad.  But only time gave me the necessary wisdom to see the error of it all – not just my father’s, but my own!”

“What of your father?” I asked.  “What was his fate?”

Holmes gave an impassive shrug of his shoulders.  “I do not know, my dear Watson.  When I left for Cambridge, I never had the intention of returning to Blackheath.  And Mycroft, in his resentment for what his abuse drove me to, never spoke to him again.  He may still be alive,” he said, lips pursed in a thoughtful way.  “If he is, he’s certainly made no attempts to contact either of us.”

A moment of silence lapsed between us.  Holmes rose to refill his once again empty snifter of brandy, and I watched him with a fascination unfitting for such a common series of actions.

“This explains so much about you, Holmes,” I said eventually.

He looked at me with a sideways cock of his head but did not reply.

“Your resentment for women, your cool relationship with your brother, your reluctance to speak of your past… even, dare I say it, your avoidance of emotions!”

He cocked one eyebrow but otherwise continued to remain silent.

“There is a new psychological theory out there – I believe it was an Austrian physician who penned it – called the unconscious mind,” I explained.  “He said that it shapes our personalities and behaviors from early childhood.  And if yours was so full of sorrow and violence, it isn’t any wonder at all that you withdraw from emotion now, what, with all that it is associated with.”

He spun his brandy in his glass.  “And here I thought it was merely because they impeded the logical faculty.”  He did not look, I think, entirely convinced of my assertion, but he did seem to be giving it due thought.  “Interesting.”

“But Holmes,” I said, a new and important question suddenly dawning on me, “you _don’t_ blame yourself any longer, correct?  You know that your mother’s death wasn’t, and could not have possibly been your fault?”

I detected the slightest downward twitch of the right corner of his mouth.  “Postpartum depression is a documented illness,” he said.  Alarmed at his tone, I rose from the couch and crossed the room so I could grasp my friend by his arms.

“Holmes!” I said.  “Yours is the most logical mind I have ever known, yet you allow yourself to be deluded by such a blatant untruth?  You were a baby!”

“A baby which, had it never been conceived, would mean that one more lovely, doting mother might still be in the world,” he said.  He was angry again, this time at himself.

“ _Holmes!_ ” I cried, aghast.  “You cannot possibly—!”

“It may be best to drop the subject,” said he, turning away from ne.  “It has been my cross to bear my entire life.  It isn’t likely—”

Desperate to derail this horrible fallacy, I interrupted him: “It’s Mycroft’s fault, then!”

That seemed to startle him into silence.

“Well, by your reasoning, it must be his fault, mustn’t it?” I asked.  “Perhaps if his birth had not left her ill, her second conception would have been a successful one, and there would never have been any postpartum depression.

“Or perhaps it’s your father’s fault,” I added, “for marrying her at all.  Or perhaps it is the fault of your grandparents for passing on a predisposition to the disease!”

Holmes’s jaw was clenched shut.  He stared into my face with more intensity than I’d ever witnessed, as if he was looking for the logical flaw in my argument.

“Blame can only be assigned in matters of _choice_ , Holmes, and what happened to your mother was _chance_ ,” I urged.  “The tragedy was the consequence of a series of events, brought on by nothing more than the cruel entropy of God’s universe.  Holmes,” I said, my voice then dropping to a whisper, “after all this time, all the pain you’ve been through, and with all the mental faculties you now possess – _you must let this go_.”

For long – so very long – my dear friend stared at me in silence.  He drained the last of his brandy and set it down on the end table by his chair.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Holmes said.  “Obvious to everyone, it seems, but me.”

I could not contain the smile that broke across my face.

“I recall you once told me to whisper ‘Norbury’ in your ear to remind you of your fallibility,” I said, thinking back on our adventure of the yellow face and the little mixed-race child.  “Perhaps from now on I should whisper Erela.”


End file.
